Ask IAN - AI Assistant - Installation & First Steps
AskiaAnalyse's new functionality, Ask IAN, can be used from suite versions 7.1.0.0 onward. It allows you ask the AI assistant questions about the survey you have open, such as: "What has changed since last wave?" or "Which demographic has the highest aided awareness for the competitor brands?". Ask IAN will search for and analyse relevant variables in your dataset before returning with a summary answer and one or more tables to demonstrate its findings. This means users don't have to spend as long running different tables to find patterns and formulate insights. Ask Ian does this for you!
There are more details on what you can ask and how to interpret the responses in the following articles:
Many of you will already use company or product-based AI assistants in your day-to-day work.
The assistant works by using a Large Language Model (LLM) that acts as a 'brain' to understand questions asked by the user. Think of it as a advanced inference or autocomplete tool that uses vast amounts of text to learn how language is best interpreted.
What it should do next is determine by cross-referencing your words against the details of your survey, e.g. words found in question shortcuts/captions, response texts, weighting names etc.
These vast amounts of text data mentioned above must be stored somewhere.
Cloud LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude) are hosted on powerful remote servers and accessed via the internet for a subscription fee.
Local LLMs (e.g., Llama, DeepSeek via Ollama) run directly on your personal hardware. They provide absolute data privacy, work offline, and have no ongoing subscription costs.
In the R&D phase, Ask IAN was tested using a local LLM (Ollama) but the performance was resource heavy, slow and not as accurate as our tests using the cloud based LLMs. This illustrates why companies are willing to pay good money to access such services. Local LLMs may improve enough in the future, however, so Analyse allows you to use both.
Also note, there are no privacy concerns using the cloud based LLMs as none of your survey data is kept anywhere outside of your Analyse session.
After first running the V7.1.0.0 installer, Ask Ian can be accessed from the Help menu in AskiaAnalyse:
Before you can use this, however, you must set three options, telling Analyse which LLM it should use. Otherwise you will see the assistant return some errors for you:
These options can be set under the menu: Tools > Options > Ask IAN:
As an example, for the Lite LLM Model I use claude-sonnet-4-6
If you are unsure which LLM URL or model to use, please check with you in-house AI, Dev or IT experts for advice on which LLMs are currently used or are best suited.
Once you have set your API key be careful sharing images or videos of your Analyse Ask IAN settings as someone else might copy these and use your AI assistant subscription.
The other information shown in the options above is automatically set. You will notice that the installation now creates an additional folder in C:\ProgramData\Askia
ASK IAN also uses node.js and will update its version automatically on install if it is not recent enough (see section above: Jupiter)
As always, we welcome your feedback and hope you enjoy IAN's assistance!
Disclaimer
As with all AI systems, very occasionally IAN may not quite summarise things in exactly the expected way, so it will remain important to include a checking process for any output that will be put in front of clients.